Bohack

Let me start off by saying I hate Real Player and discourage it’s use. Having said that an alternative is using VLC Media Player or Video LAN Player (same). It was once said that VLC could play a database file if you opened it up, so it definitely supports a simple RTSP Real Time Streaming Protocol URL. However for the end user it’s a little complicated, so to make it easier we can register RTSP:// with Internet Explorer and anytime the user comes across an RTSP link; it’ll just work!

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On most of my Windows boxes I have multiple DVD-RW or CDROM drives. Telling them apart by the letter is always an issue, because I always put the blank CD or DVD in to the wrong drive. The problem is that you can’t right click and go to properties to change the CDROM/DVD-RW label, like you can on a local disk.
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Window 7 is far more secure than prior Windows operating systems. The Windows directory is secured down with permissions so even an Administrator cannot circumvent security. Some security features are good other not so much, the security on fonts is a good example. I will explain how to allow normal non-privileged users access to install their own fonts without the UAC prompt.

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I had just completed a successful upgrade of my domain controllers at work to Windows Server 2008 R2. After the upgrade we found that anyone that used the proxy and relied in automatic settings could no longer receive the proxy address. This is in “Automatically detect settings” in the “LAN settings” of Internet Explorer options.

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Sysprep is very useful in preparing an image for cloning / imaging by stripping all specialization from the installation like: drives, SID, PNP enumeration, name and more. During the next reboot PNP is initiated and the Out Of Box Experience is run; this is similar to a preloaded laptop or computer from the factory starting up for the first time.
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When setting up a secure server farm you always want to filter egress traffic. This means that all outbound traffic is blocked by default, including the web traffic from the servers. When surfing is required for drivers and downloads, this is usually handled by setting the proxy in the Internet Explorer options.  However if you want certain processes / services like Windows Update to automatically retrieve updates and wait for manual approval, the next time you login. You need to set a proxy server up and force the Local Machine to use it. The setting in the IE properties page is for the Current User only.

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The key to mastering permissions at the command line in Vista and Windows Server 2008 Server is learning the icacls.exe command. With the introduction of Windows Vista, you can no longer select multiple items like folders and files and apply permissions to a group of objects. The recommended way is to use the command line and the icacls.exe command.

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Recently I found a problem when using Mac OS X and Windows Server 2003 R2 as a file server. The problem exists in the permissions that are applied to user folders. When applying permissions to shares you normally start out with a very restrictive permission structure at the top. As you create the folders you add permissions for users and groups to permit and restrict access for others. This structure of permissions is very common in dealing with corporate shares. We also share the folder with ‘domain users’ only having change or modify access to the entire share. This eliminates people applying their own permissions and locking everyone out including themselves. This is a common task for a network admin in setting up permissions.
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Recently I needed to extract a links from a web page; normally I would use some Linux commands ported to windows and get the job done. In the end I needed to format the relative link to a full URL, so I decided to use Excel. However when I imported the web page into excel I found that the URL was embedded in the friendly name of the hyperlink.

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Microsoft Search should not be feared, it is now an optional install from Microsoft Update Services. It is integrates into Office 2007 for email search capability. However one problem is it changes the default search of Windows Explorer to Desktop Search. So it has pissed off a lot of people and made them uninstall it. There is hope and a way to switch it back.

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